Know Your Rights - Don't Sell Yourself Short.
I hope the reader finds some of the listed information useful.
Important advice listed below for would-be authors to copy and save.
AUTHORS RIGHTS
Anthology and Quotation Rights
These are the rights for the publisher to grant permission for another publication to quote from or include your work in an anthology. The author would usually be consulted before this took place.
Audio Rights (Abridged)
The right to record a shortened version (you may get approval of the abridgement) of your book for sale on tape, CD or digital download.
Audio Rights (Unabridged)
The right to record the full, verbatim text of your book for sale on tape, CD or digital download.
Book Club Rights
Book Clubs such as The Book People and Scholastic Book Fairs receive high discounts from publishers for committing to a certain number of copies - as a result the terms agreed in your contract will be different to the terms for other book sales.
Copyright
Copyright is established as soon as you create your work. However, all it protects is the expression of your idea. You cannot copyright the idea itself. In the UK, copyright remains for 70 years after the death of the author and until that point permission should be requested to use or quote from works.
Exclusive
If you sign exclusive rights to a publisher then they are the only ones who can exploit those rights in the territories you have agreed with them.
Film Rights
Film companies will option the rights to a book so that they can make the film adaptation - some of these options never turn into film deals but you get to keep the money, and you might be able to sell the option again.
First Serial
First Serialisation rights are more common to high profile biography and other non-fiction. They are usually sold to newspapers/magazines to generate press prior to publication.
Foreign Rights
These are usually sold to international publishing houses to enable them to translate the work into their native language, or to publish their own edition in agreed territories if the language remains the same.
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)
There are rights associated with anything you create (your intellectual property) which you can exploit to gain revenue.
Merchandise Rights
Merchandise rights enable companies to create non-book products that are a spin-off from your work.
Non-Exclusive
Non-exclusive rights are more common with companies who help indie and self publishers than they are with traditional publishers. It means that while one edition of your work is produced by a company; you could also produce another edition, in the same format, language or territory yourself.
Permissions
Permissions are usually granted, by you or your publisher, to people who want to quote from your work. They would usually pay a fee for this depending on what they wanted to use it for. You will also need to clear permission for any copyrighted material you quote in your own work - such as in an epigraph.
Radio and TV Straight Reading
A straight reading for Radio and TV is different from a dramatisation and can be sold separately.
Royalties
Royalties are a pre-agreed percentage of revenue that the publisher will pay to you per copy of work sold. Typically these would initially be set against your advance and only when that had earned out would you start receiving additional payments.
Territory
When you sell rights you agree which territories, or countries, the publisher can exploit those rights in. This means you could sell English rights to a company in the US for publication in North America, while also selling English rights to a company in the UK for publication in the UK and commonwealth.
Translation Rights
You can sell the rights for a publisher to translate your work into another language and sell the foreign language edition of the book in the territories where that language is spoken.
TV and Dramatisation Rights
These rights cover companies who want to dramatise your work for television or radio play.
I hope this brief summary offers a basic understanding of the kind of rights which authors should be aware of, and the potential opportunities. The question is how can I, the author, be doing more to ensure I am best maximising these rights?
Would-be Author’s Royalties.
The time to negotiate your rights is when your publisher offers you a contract. Do not sign a contract without taking expert legal advice. If you are foolish enough to do so, you will probably find that you have signed all your rights away, and that you're tied to a long book deal with them. You should avoid vanity publishers, or other types of publisher that want to charge you money to produce your book. It is always advisable to first try and hook an agent, then let them negotiate on your behalf.
The main things you should consider are agreed royalties on a rising scale, the more books you sell. Electronic rights, English rights, foreign writes, film writes.
Royalties are usually agreed at between 8-12% a copy of a would-be author’s debut novel.
It's important to realise that royalties are not based on the jacket price of your book. Publishers give huge discounts of 50-65 per cent on the jacket price to wholesalers and book clubs.
Say you secure a deal for 10% royalties. Also, that your novel is priced at £5. With a 50 per cent discount to a wholesaler, you would receive 25p a copy. That's £250 for every thousand copies, £25.000 for a 100,000 copies, so don't pack up your day job.
It's not all bad news, because if you self-publish on Amazon, you will receive 70 per cent royalties.
I hope this summary offers a basic understanding of the kind of rights which authors should be aware of, and the potential opportunities. The question is how can I, the author, be doing more to ensure I am best maximising these rights?
I hope that helps.
Good luck.
Hi, Adrian!
I've got this article copied onto my computer so that I can refer to it in future without searching back numbers of Q&As. In fact, I thought that you'd already uploaded this as a Q&A some time ago [and that I'd recently stumbled across the earlier posting] and were trying now to keep it in the public eye. (A loable idea!) But a quick Google search removes this possibility, so that recent sleep deprivation must have caused hallucinations.
Anyway, thanks for the work that you've put in here! And can you ask W&A if you could post it as a blog?
Just to add that as a novice, you'd probably have to do all the publicity yourself anyway - publishers won't have a budget for that unless you are the next Great Writer. See which way the sums best add up for you.
Important info here Adrian - thanks. It's essential for novice writers to understand any contract they are offered - and also to realise that, as novices, they are unlikely to make pots of money out of being published. Even large and reputable publishing houses are in this for the money they can make out of any writer's work. The writer seems to be at the bottom of the food chain, which is ludicrous - without the writer, there is no food chain - so self-publishing seems at first glance to be the way to go.
Remember, though, that publishers should be earning (some of) their money by looking after the writer's interests. If you can be your own publicist, marketer, person on the street hawking your wares to bookshops, interview-arranger, and so forth, and your book is perfectly presented and edited, then self-publishing may well earn you more. Of course you'll have spent a substantial part of that in all of the above... It's up to you.